WebI Influence Council Q&A and presentation from TechEd Las Vegas

During TechEd 2012 in Las Vegas, SAP BusinessObjects was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to present the work of the Web Intelligence Influence council.

The presentation covers a short review of the improvements of the recent WebI releases, as well as what’s planned for the coming releases.

If you have missed the presentation, you can view the slides here.

Following the presentation, we had time for a Q&A session. The questions and their answers are covered here:

Q1: Will there be integrated help in the app? I’m looking for context-relevant steps,how do I do x task.
A: We have already the help available via the menu bar. Contextual help would
be a good way to improve usability. We will consider this enhancement for a
future release.

Q2: Universe list tool tip is visible only for a short time. Some descriptions are too long
to read in that time. One work-around suggested was taking a screenshot with the tool tip open.
A: Maybe the solution would be to have a remaining tool tip as long as you hover over the object. We have added this enhancement for a future release.

Q3: For the layout, will the pixel measure be an option again, in addition to the cm and inch?
A: We are already tracking this feature in order to add it in WebI.

Q4: Will there be an option to organize the Universe list in to “folders” or some otherlogical grouping? It would make it easier to find the right universes. 
A: This is a great idea to improve usability & easy access to my universe.
We could do  this in three ways: 1) provide a view of the folder structure defined in CMS by IT. 2) add a kind of FAVORITES universes to speed up the access to the ones I most use. 3) provode the ability to the end-user to create his own universe structure. 
Theses ERs have been added to the feature backlog.

Q5: Is there a comparison of the feature set of the HTML vs Java applet? It would help to decide before starting a job, if the HTML is sufficient and that would save time waiting for the Java applet to load.
A: A list like this is to be published soon on SCN.

Q6: Will there be further export options, especially the export to XLS. DeskI had specific formatting options for XLS export, will those come back?
A: Within the release of the FP3 we have improved the “Export to Excel” feature. For a future release, we are planning to improve this functionality, specially the chart export.